Most developers who have worked with BizTalk for a while will realize the benefits of using direct binding on orchestration ports to improve flexibility and loose coupling. What is not often realized is that using direct rather than specify later port binding comes with a bit of a trade-off in that the increased flexibility results in less hand holding for administrators, and it is altogether possible for them to stop/unenlist an orchestration or send port resulting in routing failures and unprocessed messages which might be difficult to replay. Seeing as guaranteed delivery is one of the biggest selling points on most projects involving BizTalk Server this is too big a hole to overlook. In this blog post I will detail how hand-holding is relaxed for direct binding and introduce error handling patterns that can be used in orchestrations to overcome routing failures.

One of the things most BizTalk administrators might notice when orchestrations use direct binding is that starting an orchestration no longer require starting all send ports that the orchestration publishes messages to. At run time this could mean that the loose coupling offered by direct binding has removed the guarantee that subscribers to your published messages will be active. If an orchestration publishes a message for which there are no subscribers then a non-resumable routing failure instance will be raised and a PersistenceException exception will be raised in the orchestration.

I have had some pretty concerned colleagues ask me about the dreaded PersistenceException. This is nothing more than a curiously named exception representing a routing failure. The way I tend to deal with such exceptions in guaranteed delivery scenarios is to create a scope around my send shape (possibly around other close by associated shapes as well) and to catch the PersistenceException (this is in the Microsoft.XLANGS.BaseTypes namespace and it’s assembly is referenced by default in BizTalk Server projects). If the exception is encountered then I raise an alert to administrators (via the ESB portal or relevant exception handling framework) advising of the routing failure, and suspend the orchestration instance. Once the administrators have fixed the problem they can resume the orchestration which will loop back to before the send shape and resend the message.

Now of course this pattern comes with a bit more effort in terms of development but one has to ask whether their system can afford to lose a message or at the very least have to go through painful and manual message replay processes.

Another fun scenario I’ve encountered that can go very wrong is taking advantage of direct binding in orchestrations in tandem with a publish subscribe pattern with multiple subscribers to the same message. Say you have an orchestration that sends out a message which is subscribed to by a logging/auditing port and another port which actually performs an important action such as updating a LOB system. If the LOB send port was in an unenlisted state then the message would be directed to your auditing send port, no PersistenceException would be raised in your orchestration and the message would never update the LOB system. So much for guaranteed delivery…

What I would do in this case is create two copies of the same message in the orchestration, each with some sort of instructional context property that is used to direct the message to the relevant send port (the values of this context property being set to abstract values such as “Audit” or “UpdateLOB” rather than the name of the send port since this doesn’t steer away from the concept of loose coupling too far), wrap the send shapes for the two messages in an atomic scope so that only one persistence point is encountered when the messages are sent out (this is a whole other subject but it is important to keep your persistence point and thus your I/Os against your SQL server to a minimum), and wrap the atomic scope with a long running scope which catches a PersistenceException. I then implement the same exception handling pattern I mentioned earlier in this post.

Once again this comes at a greater effort in development and introduces more overhead on the BizTalk runtime, muddies up your orchestration with logic which is arguably plumbing rather than business logic, and somewhat takes away from how loosely coupled your orchestration is. That said it does ensure guaranteed delivery.

The exception handling patterns that I’ve discussed here stem from my own cautious nature but I have seen them pay off in multiple instances and have also seen the cost when such thought isn’t applied when required. I wouldn’t say they are required in every orchestration but I would at least encourage developers to think of these scenarios when they decide to what extent they are going to handle exceptions. At the very least if such patterns aren’t implemented do think about putting a section or at least a blurb in your support documentation to discuss how to recover from such failures.

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11 Comments:

Really nice ideas, at our company we where also thinking of this. This takes us a step closer.
Is was thinking of developing a custom (call) orchestration for communication that encapsulates the error handling.

If I need a second independent subscriber (in your example it is the Audit port), I add a port with filter subscription. The primary (LOB) port is still binded (non-direct), so primary port should be enlisted if Orchestration is enlisted, and Audit port can be enlisted or unenlisted. In this architecture there are no changes in orchestration. Orchestration and Audit port are independent (loose coupled), Orchestration and LOB port are dependent.

Good comment Leonid, definitely a clean way of doing things when you’re using specify-later binding yet still choose to take advantage of context based routing. I might decide to go for such a mixed approach in the future.

Thanks James. Good comment, and I would take your statement one step further and suggest that even if you’re not using a loop it is a good idea to scope your correlation sets (or any other variables for that matter).

Thanks, but I think this does not work if you have a request/response port.
When building the project, with an extra scope around the send port you will get,
incomplete requestresponse operation; missing ‘send’
Which is clearly not the case.